Towards a performance culture: Managing cultural change in the high performance programme of a National Sports Organisation

John Alder

New Zealand Rugby League

john.alder@nzrl.co.nz

The culture of a team within sports is recognized as the product of a complex series of social interactions influencing team and athlete behaviour and arguably success (Schroeder, 2010). Culture and cultural management is well established in high performance sport’s lexicon (Cruickshank & Collins, 2012) and is a predominant feature of modern high performance sport leadership as coaches and performance leaders attempt to establish high performing cultures (Cruickshank & Collins, 2012). Despite such popularity, there is limited clarity in the literature surrounding the key features and processes through which cultures become high performing.

Overall, this study has an intended outcome of improving on and off field performance by enhancing the understanding and performance of the culture of a high performance team at a national sports organisation (NSO). The focus for study is the high performance unit (CEO and performance leaders, athletes, coaches, and support staff of the national team programme). To establish some clarity it was necessary to understand the present culture in the high performance unit at the NSO. As meaning is inextricably linked with culture in that as people make sense of reality, they construct meaning and where patterns of meaning become shared, this leads to the formation of culture (Barker, 2008) an exploratory pilot study was conducted exploring the meanings within the unit’s culture. The pilot identified a number of sources of personal and shared meanings and also revealed a number of organizational and leadership factors that have shaped the present meanings within the high performance unit.

Based on the results of the pilot study provided to high performance managers, the first change cycle has attempted to address philosophical alignment in the high performance unit. Using an initial theoretical framework located within organizational culture and sensemaking, grounded in an interpretive research paradigm, data will be generated as a result of a collaborative approach between the researcher and the high performance unit. The project will engage in an ethnographic action research approach to continually collaborate with key leaders and members of the high performance unit to identify specific issues, design interventions and action steps, and reflect upon outcomes, passing through a series of action phases aimed at enhancing the organization’s ability to act as agents of effectively enhance the high performance culture.  Participant observation, unstructured interviews and artefact analysis are the primary methods of data collection.  Data analysis will occur throughout the ethnographic action research process to determine emergent themes and inform future cycles of action research. This study will be the result of a qualitative inquiry spanning almost a year attempting to make a cultural change.

Keywords: Culture, Performance, change, meaning.

May 2012 - May 2015

Action research

Auckland

High performance

Rugby league

1474

March 18, 2014